NewsWatch: Summary of business news

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U.S. shares stage retreat

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Staging a rapid about-face on a late-day bout of buying, the Dow Industrials ended on positive ground after posting losses for most of the session. The Nasdaq, on the other hand, remained in negative territory but managed to end well of its lows as buyers emerged to support many tech shares. The huge volatility witnessed during the trading session underscores investors' uncertainty regarding the market's near-term direction, observers said. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA, -1.35%
gained 85.32 points, or 0.8 percent, to 10,304.84. The Nasdaq Composite
$compq
dropped 31.07 points, or 0.7 percent, to 4,380.67.

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- Treasury bonds posted hefty gains Tuesday, driving long-term rates to their lowest levels in months. Several factors aided the fixed-income market, analysts said, including a drop in crude prices and flight-to-quality buying out of stocks and into bonds. Consequently, as the Dow Industrials moved back into the positive late in the session, bonds conceded some of Tuesday's advance.

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- They'll still have to pull together their records and do some hard thinking at tax time, but the majority of America Online members plan to stow their pencils and use the Internet to file their taxes in the next three years, according to a new CBS MarketWatch/America Online poll. The poll found 74 percent of AOL subscribers said they or their preparers were likely to file taxes online within three years, with 45 percent saying they were very likely to do so. Only one quarter of the 1,446 members polled said they weren't likely to file electronically in that period.

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- The federal judge presiding over the landmark Microsoft antitrust trial quizzed company and government lawyers Tuesday on whether the company illegally tied its browser to the Windows operating system. U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson frequently interrupted attorneys for both sides with questions as they presented final oral arguments in the case. Jackson last November issued findings of fact that branded Microsoft as a ruthless monopolist who squelched competitors and harmed consumers.

HELSINKI (CBS.MW) -- Stora Enso Oyj, Europe's No. 1 paper company, said Tuesday it's making a big foray into the North American paper market through an agreed acquisition of Consolidated Papers Inc. It will pay 4.9 billion euros ($4.8 billion) in stock, cash and assumed debt, forking out $44 in total value for each Consolidated share, which represents a 69 percent premium over Friday's close. The price tag of 4.9 billion euros includes $900 million of assumed debt. Together the two will be the largest producer of paper and board by capacity world-wide, with total 1999 sales of some 12.4 billion euros and total paper capacity of some 15 million metric tonnes.

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- SBC Communications Inc. on Tuesday announced plans to buy Sterling Commerce, an online business-to-business software and services provider, in an all-cash deal valued at $3.9 billion. Telecommunications company SBC said the deal is a cash-tender offer for Sterling shares at $44.25 per share. As such, the deal sets an about 40-percent premium for Sterling shares, with Sterling closing down 1 3/8 on Friday at 31 9/16. The offer is expected to begin in the next few days, the company said in a statement. SBC is expecting the deal could close as soon as March. SBC said the deal "gives SBC the skills and expertise to offer its business customers even more advanced solutions in the future."

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Motorola on Tuesday announced it's buying network processor maker C-Port Corp. in a deal valued at $430 million. Motorola said it will issue about 2.9 million shares to pay for the Massachusetts-based company that makes network processors for optical networks and Internet switching and routing. "By bringing C-Port into the Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector fold, we now enable high bandwidth network processing applications," said Daniel Artusi, general manager of Motorola Networking and Computing Systems Group.

RESTON, Va. (CBS.MW) -- Nextel Communications, the only independent national wireless phone carrier, said Tuesday that its fourth-quarter loss was narrower than expected amid another record growth in subscribers. The company also announced a 2-for-1 stock split. Before a charge for retiring debt, the wireless carrier said its los attributable to common shareholders fell to $301 million, or 85 cents a share, from $413 million, or $1.43, a year earlier. Nextel
nxtl
was expected to lose 97 cents, according to the consensus estimate of analysts surveyed by First Call Corp. Revenue nearly doubled to $980 million from $592 million a year earlier. International revenue, though just a small part of the overall total, tripled to $104 million from $35 million.

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- Fed Chair Alan Greenspan will deliver to the Senate the same talk the House of Representatives heard last week. The market will react not so much to what he will say because investors heard his cool-down comments Thursday. But the double-dose of Greenspan caution will likely have a chilling effect on trading action..

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Oil futures fell Tuesday as an uncertain market braced for hints that OPEC might soften its commitment to production curbs next month amid increasing concern about rising consumer prices. However, "the perception that this view is unanimous for the second quarter of the year was scotched" when Bijan Zanganeh, Iran's oil minister, said OPEC should address a rise in supplies in the fourth quarter, instead of the second quarter.

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Let's say you want a piece of the latest biotech action but you don't want to back just one company. Or one drug. Wall Street is unleashing a new wave of securities that cover entire industries. Many of these securities are like index investing, where you buy a mutual fund that mirrors, say, the S&P 500, or the Nasdaq 100. The baskets they represent are, well, legion: biotech, financial services, pharmaceuticals, utilities, even foreign-stock indexes (those are called WEBS, for World Equity Benchmark Shares). Here's the difference: These new creatures trade like stocks -- every minute of the trading day.

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Up until recently, if you were orbiting the earth in search of large numbers of people who were willing to invest in stocks you would have had to train your telescope on one country: the United States. That is now changing. This could have profound economic and financial effects not only abroad, but also here. The two major areas which are now in the process of coming alive -- where equity ownership by the masses is concerned -- are Europe and Japan.

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Add another concern to the worries cascading up and down the corridors of Wall Street -- the record levels of debt piling up on the books of banks and other lenders. In spite of the fact that the U.S. economy has been expanding nonstop for almost nine years, both consumers and businesses are carrying huge amounts of debt. On the consumer side, the Federal Reserve calculates that the average household's total debt load (including home mortgages) now exceeds its annual income -- for the first time in history.

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Oil prices zoom. Interest rates climb. The stock market quivers. Oh, what a terrible time this is to invest! As a matter of fact, it's always a terrible time to invest in the stock market -- at least in some respects. Now a Philadelphia firm named 1838 Investment Advisers, which is an MBIA Asset Management Company, has published an instructive report. Its title tells it (almost) all: "66 Reasons Why People Did Not Invest in the Stock Market." Then it goes back, year by year, to 1934 and cites some compelling reasons

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (CBS.MW) -- Their faces may grace our greenbacks now, but the early presidents' own personal finances didn't always fit the bill. In fact, most of America's early leaders were impoverished at some point in their political careers, according to Richard Norton Smith, presidential historian and author of the new book "Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?" Whether due to a lack of business acumen or old-fashioned overspending, some of the most powerful people of their time found it difficult to stay in the black.

Intraday Data provided by SIX Financial Information and subject to terms of use. Historical and current end-of-day data provided by SIX Financial Information. All quotes are in local exchange time. Real-time last sale data for U.S. stock quotes reflect trades reported through Nasdaq only. Intraday data delayed at least 15 minutes or per exchange requirements.